42 Tasks for a Scrum Master’s Job

Questions like the following are coming up quite often when I do Scrum training or coaching:

Why should the Scrum Master and Project Manager roles be filled different people? (Quora)

Will a scrum master for a team of 10 be a full time position or can a programmer fill this position if highly trained in agile planning? (Quora)

Behind those questions is the assumption that the Scrum Master is not a full time role. The askers of those questions conjecture that you save money by merging two roles or by placing the duty of the two roles on a single person.

The questions are asked by Scrum master beginners, by product owners, by team members, by managers, by stakeholders of any kind. From the three roles in Scrum, everyone seems to immediately grasp that being a team member is a full time job – because she develops software all day – and that being a product owner is a full time job – because he develops the product all day -, but it seems far beyond imagination what a Scrum master’s job could be and why the heck that would be a full time job, too.

Maybe those who ask don’t know what it is that a Scrum Master does all day long?

Here’s a list of 42 things I’d say are part of a Scrum masters job:

Meetings

Facilitating meetings for the team. This includes:

preparing

moderation

postprocessing

Holding retrospectives. Retrospectives are special meetings, therefore I count them separately.

Encouraging the use of Agile Engineering Practices within the development team (this is a huge field to spent a Scrum Master’s time in, including e.g. one click releases, continuous delivery, feature flags, and many more).

It’s a great list. I think when a team is new to Scrum its a very intensive job but once the team is self organising well I prefer to step back whenever I can and get on with some development. After 4 years of being a Scrummaster on the same team I now spend less than an hour a day on these tasks although the team is still moving forward.

Interesting. I never would advice a scrum master to be part of one and the same team for more than 2 years. I doubt that she could still have the “perspective from outside in” to challenge the team and kick it out of its comfort zone from time to time.

Some teach that SM role should be temporary. I agree ;-> as soon as ***change is reduced to zero*** (inside and outside the team) then an experienced team might be able organise their meetings, their learning, their communications, cross-team co-ordination, assumptions, habits, obstacles, conflicts… and still get the software done.

Oh, but if there is ***no change*** you can go back to Waterfall, too! Soooo much more *efficient* ROFL

I have always maintained that whilst the focus of the purpose changes with the team over time, the job still exists in a full-time capacity. Someone else also made a good point recently that as the team becomes more productive using Scrum the impediments potentially become bigger, more challenging to the company, not just the team.

Too many people start out as ScrumMasters thinking it’s a just “process control” and fail to get the true spirit of Scrum into the team.

I would add one further category, that of “psychology”, with elements like:
o Envisioning the future (how the team wants the work to work, next month, next year, …)
o Building and articulating a common goal (aka common purpose) for the team (which may morph or change from time to time)
o Surfacing team values and ethos
o Helping everyone inside AND outside the team understand the role of mindset in team performance
o Helping the team improve its social skills, especially wrt constructive conversations.

(Maybe some overlap with some other items in other categories).

And also one other key element missing(?) from your items (can’t immediately see the best category for it):
o Keeping the team together: protecting the team as a cohesive unit (e.g. from other parts of the business wanting to poach people, or people’s time), even from complete dissolution (aka tear-down)

I am on an Agile journey – new to it, but totally engrossed in it. This is one of the most useful and constructive Agile info I have received – and all within just this one blog story. Many, many thanks! I WILL be using this info to add to my Agile journey :)

The scrum master has to be a different person from Product Owner. This is obvious! Otherwise we have the old style command-control project manager (or boss!)
But is very difficult that a company (expecially in Italy) agrees to have one person not productive (they have too many people in burocracy and a lot of boss-lovers in PR!!!)
However is more easy to put a SM like a team member (the rules of Scrum allow it) and the SM has more priority in doing her/his 42 Tasks than his developement tasks.
If you start with strong rules, you will defeated. You have to introduce rules step by step. This for the old slow fearful greedy treacherous italy

Thanks for your thoughts, roberto. I disagree about you saying that the Scrum Master is “one person not productive”. See the 42 reasons above.
If those 42 reasons are not enough for a full time job, then I would recommend to introduce a team member as a Scrum Master crosswise, i.e. team member in team A is Scrum Master in team B and vice versa. If you have a team member as a Scrum Master in the same team, you’d end up with lots of conflicts of goals within this one person, e.g. e would have huge difficulties to remain neutral as a facilitator for the team.

In my experience: no, a release manager cannot be a good Scrum Master. The release managers I know have at least two responsibilities that hinders being a good Scrum Master: a) also being a line manager, and b) being responsible for everything technical to deliver software. While a is in conflict with servant leadership and that the Scrum Master has no power to direct, b interferes with the Dev Team’s responsibility for everything technical.

To give a more sophisticated answer it certainly would be helpful to be clear about what a release manager is from your point of view.

Great post, but I disagree that in every case SM is a full-time job. On small teams of 4-5 it doesn’t take 100% of your time to do the SM tasks, and I think it’s a good thing if you still do some development work. I believe the SM is really just a member of the team that plays the role of facilitator, meaning the really important tasks first and foremost are resolving blockers and acting as buffer. Really your job is to keep the team moving along at their maximum velocity.

A lot of the things you listed are great if you have the time, but in certain company/department structures the people management tasks are done by project managers. And I think freeing up your time to do some development keeps you more in touch with how the team is doing and what they’re working on, allowing you to perform your primary role better in my opinion.

Anyway, just some food-for-thought. Scrum is different at every company depending on the structure and other factors, so the role of SM will vary greatly.

Hey Ian, thanks! Well, I’m glad that it works for you the way you described. There are always exceptional environments. What you describe, though, is from MPOV different to Scrum in crucial ways: the SM is not part of the dev team, hence he can’t take over dev work; there are no project managers in Scrum; there aren’t event projects in Scrum; the SM doesn’t need to code with the team to be in touch, on the contrary, it prevents the team from having an outside perspective, something which is immensely important for a Scrum team. Changing the environmental conditions for the SM role, I totally understand how you came to the conclusion that it’s not a full-time job. Why you would change the conditions for the SM role in the first place, well that’s a different topic though…

Even after 3 years this article is still found by new readers like me :-)

Great article. I have seen it happen that organization banished Scrum because it doesn’t work. Reason: the Scrum Master(s) need to service 3 or more teams. And this during introduction of the framework…

I never realized how many thinks a Scrum Master does all day long, until this article hit me. Indeed, I have been doing all of these things (apart from the FedEx days) and I was exhausted. I have been teaching this article to new Scrum Master trainees in our organization for quite some time now. It’s very helpful to see the tasks grouped under these categories. Many thanks for this great resource!

Thanks for nice summary of ScrumMaster’s responsibilities.
I have often come across people (Managers) stating that building team’s competency is also SM’s resposibility. Also, that SM should identify where competency gaps are there in the team and should work along with the managers to create training plans for individuals.
I have also been told that since we have SM for a team, we do not need managers and hence all responsibilities lie with SM alone.
This is different from what I have learnt in SM workshops and tranings.

Great article. It gives the perfect picture of Scrum Master Responsibilities. I have seen during my coaching, most of the time Scrum Master struggles to get their jobs done on daily basis and specifically resolving the tough impediments. In such case, the responsibility of Scrum Master is to escalate the impediment based on its severity and agile of not resolution so that there would not be major impact on the Iteration planned delivery.

Scrum Master has to show the courage in the face of fear. He has to work with team, Product Owner to ensure that there is a balance between the Quality of Working Software and Speed of the delivery. Building Quality working software should not take long time because of poor practice implementation and Frequency of Releases and Deployments should not impact the quality of working software.

Hence the main responsibility of the scrum master is to work with team to balance the momentum between QUALITY and SPEED on continual basis. Off course he must take help of experienced agile coach on his agile journey for better outcomes.

Awesome! Unfortunately, many decision makers still believe scrum master role is not a full time role and scrum masters are expected to replace either project managers or delivery managers or technical managers. That’s one of the reasons, many organizations do not use designation “scrum master” for the role of a scrum master; rather they prefer to call that person an “Iteration Manager” or “Agile Project Manager”.